-----Original Message----- From: Terry Blanton http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE69J35X20101020
"Parallel universes, unknown forms of matter, extra dimensions... These are not the stuff of cheap science fiction but very concrete physics theories that scientists are trying to confirm with the LHC and other experiments." Pretty good comments, but with an agenda which is being exposed below that quote, about too much hype and theatrics coming from Cern - trying to justify the insane cost of the LHC boondoggle (also MIT and a few others are guilty of way too much PR hype for tiny advances funded by public money). At vortex, as we are all aware, we strongly frown on too much of this kind of self-promotion :) Seriously - it may be counter-productive to claim 11 dimensions, or whatever is the favorite untested claim. It seems more intuitive to me, if not more accurate scientifically to look at all of the "extra" dimensions, not as dimensions per se, but as fractals describing the linkage of the extremes - that is, connecting 3-space across the expanse of the universe, back to 1-space so as to explain forces in a kind of symmetric GUT which is tied to dimensional geometry. Mandelbrot, RIP, would be delighted - since we tend to forget that his earliest concept of a fractal was nothing less than a "fractional dimension". Later the word became loaded with a lot of baggage that may or may not be relevant to dimensions, but some of the pretty images may surprise us, if and when we find that there is a GUT that works this way - spatially self-similar rather than mathematically rigorous. For instance, observed charge quantization, namely the fact that elementary particles carry electric charges which appear to be exact multiples of 1⁄3 of an "elementary" charge, could be tied into the particular fractal which is known as a Sierpinski triangle... (this only serves as a metaphor, as of now, but is illustrative of the way a GUT could use dimensional fractals to unify everything, since the various force layers connect spatially and not via directly through the forces they represent). Space-time then would NOT a true fourth dimension, as we like to call it today, but instead is more descriptive of the first fractal which emerges out of 3-space on the large end (i.e. "curved space") and so on. All of the other 7-100 (more or less) claimed "dimensions" are instead continuations of a fractal-sequence which revolves reality back to 1-space, and most of them seem to be related to the small end of reality (sub-nanometer). Or, in another wrinkle, with T2 (or higher dimensional time) some parts of 3-space are hidden by another kind of time progression. These may be the "parallel universes". Dirac used the term "reciprocal space" in a different way than can now be proposed (however, the crystallography people are trying to co-opt the term for their own specialty) yet this is such an expressive term that it seems inevitable that all of the higher fractals should be called sets in reciprocal space, instead of either a fourth dimension, or 7/11 'enfolded' dimensions, etc. There could be hundreds of fractals in there. All this is semantics, of course - word-salad with a glimpse of reality on the side ...
